Writing System
- Sadreɪl has a written that can be thought of as two writing systems that work together, plus a system of punctuation and Arabic mathematical systems. All writing is conducted either left to right or top to bottom, similar to Chinese or Japanese. The writing systems are as follows.
- Kanji
- The name stolen from Japanese whose kanji functions similarly, kanji in Sadreɪl are logographs, where every kanji represents one and only one thing. Not all words however do not have kanji. In other logographic systems like mandarin, every word has a character and Japanese has thousands. Sadreɪl however only has a little under 100 logographs, comprising of only the most commonly used or culturally important words in the language.
- Vinescript
- Named for its cursive vertical style developed many iterations ago, Vinescript is a purely phonetic alphabet, where every word is spelled EXACTLY as it is pronounced, where each character only makes ONE sound, similar to the IPA. Every word that does not have a kanji (Which is the vast majority of the lexicon) including things like names are written in Vinescript.
- Why a Dual System?
- The Dual nature of the Sadreɪl writing system containing Kanji and Vinescript serves many purposes.
- Kanji makes for much more information dense text than Vinescript. The room taken by one sound using vinescript can convey a whole word in Kanji. Because the most common words are in Kanji, the space savings in Sadreɪl are worth the extra learning curve.
- Ease of use and learning. Purely logographic systems are a nightmare to memorize, while alphabets are very easy to learn when they function phonetically. A dual system will have far less characters than a logographic one making it much easier to learn and maintain your knowledge.
- The artistic beauty of Kanji helps make Sadreɪl look as beautiful or maybe even more so than chinese while keeping the internal consistency of say the latin alphabet making it easy to predict
- Having very little Kanji and keeping everything else to Vinescript prevents the need to use Kanji in more complicated words; in chinese for example, 对面 (Dui mian) means opposite, however character for character literally translated would make this “Correct Noodle”. People will get very creative to avoid making new characters for rarely used words, and Vinescript will let them spell out rarely used vocabulary.
- It can be faster to write Kanji when handwriting than spell a word out in Vinescript, especially when considering Kanji’s cursive appearance leading to a low stroke count than other logographic systems.
- Kanji helps separate words and use less spacing dots, as explained in the punctuation system.
- Vinescript can be used to roughly spell foreign words that could not be written in a system that used only logographs (For example, you can not spell my name Zachary in Chinese characters, though you can get close using a Japanese syllabary)
- It’s super cool! Look at it!